UNIFORM DECISIONS
My Life in the LAPD and the North Hollywood Shootout
By
John Caprarelli with Lee Mindham
*****
Copyright © 2011 by John Caprarelli and Lee Mindham
All rights reserved.
Published by End of Watch Publishing
Los Angeles, CA
SMASHWORDS EDITION, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
The contents of this book are based on actual experiences as recalled and/or investigated to the best ability of the authors. Some of the names of those involved have been changed. Comments of a personal nature regarding any persons or organizations are the sole opinions of the authors. No legal advice is intended.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise – without prior written permission of the copyright owners.
*****
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 – Out of the Ordinary
Chapter 7 – Moving up the Ladder
Chapter 11 – Assessing the Damage
Chapter 14 – A Change of Scenery
DEDICATION
To my wife, Lynn, and two sons, John and Jim:
Evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt how blessed I am.
*****
INTRODUCTION
It’s not easy to write about one’s career and turn those memories into words that accurately describe them.
That’s not for a lack of eligible “excitement,” if you choose to call it that. My career had more than its fair share, but translating emotions into words is not always an easy task.
Putting my story down on paper was never something I chomped at the bit to do, but after many years of urging by family, friends and acquaintances, I decided the time was right.
Is it worth the price of this book? I think so.
My career was anything but ordinary. During twenty-seven years with the Los Angeles Police Department, I experienced many an extraordinary day at work, including involvement in a modern-day “Shootout at the OK Corral.”
It’s said that working the streets as a police officer is hours of boredom sprinkled with seconds of terror. I can vouch for that. It was quite a ride.
John Caprarelli
*****
PROLOGUE
With my knees pressed against the back of the driver’s seat, I can feel its metal frame. The atmosphere inside the car is electric, crackling with the ozone of anticipation and masked fear. The police radio strapped under the dash is spewing out a torrent of messages, updates and yells overrunning one another in a mass of urgency and desperation. It’s a morning of utter chaos in North Hollywood.
I turn my head to the officer in the seat next to me. Facing forward, eyes wide open and stone faced, he slowly looks to the floor as if bowing his head and momentarily closes his eyes as if saying a quick prayer. Not a bad idea after just being shot at and about to face what is yet to come.
As he raises his head a bead of sweat, as if in slow motion, rolls down his nose, catching the sunlight as it falls to oblivion between his feet.
The neck of my own shirt is soaked as well, and I can feel the beads on my face making their own journeys downward. It reminds me of my summers as a youth working up a sweat pushing the lawn mower under the hot sun. It isn’t the scent of freshly cut grass permeating the air today, however. Another scent intrudes, a dark and pungent odor that has no place among that soft reminiscence: burnt gunpowder.
Jolted back to reality, here we are crawling northbound along Agnes Avenue, four of us in an unmarked police car. Suddenly, gunshots erupt and a white Chevrolet Celebrity comes bounding through the intersection just ahead. The human silence in the car is broken.
“THERE! THERE!” yells the front seat passenger, pointing at the fleeing car.
My head snaps up, eyes catching the tail end of the Chevy, trunk open and flapping as it picks up speed. Our driver stomps on the gas pedal, and the cruiser leaps forward like an eager cheetah after its prey.
As we approach the intersection, I glance to my left—an automatic, mentally programmed check for traffic. It isn’t traffic that I get a glimpse of, rather that of a tractor-trailer parked at the curb with somebody moving underneath, someone who obviously doesn’t belong there.
Without any thought process, my instincts take over. I yell, “Hold it!” Waiting for what seems like an eternity I fling the car door open and jump out before the car comes to a complete stop. Quickly but cautiously I cross the road, gun in hand and scanning the area in front of me for any other movement or sound. There is nothing else, just the movement under the truck and the sound of my own footsteps. Suddenly, another staccato bark of large-caliber automatic gunfire snarls out from close by, followed by muted “cracks” of smaller arms returning fire.
Someone has to stop this, and I quickly realize I have the chance to do just that.
As I near the corner, a white metal fence standing waist high and rounding to my left catches my eye. The thought of its thin, sparsely arranged pillars being any sort of “cover” exits my mind as fast as it enters. So, here I stand, alone and exposed on Archwood Street facing this brown tractor-trailer unit. Underneath: my target.
Dressed all in black, resplendent with ski mask, body armor and an AK-47 assault rifle, is a wounded and highly aggressive suspect in flight. Like a cut rattlesnake, he is angrily firing at anything that moves, pinning everybody down—my brothers in arms, my friends, even innocent civilians who have happened to get within his striking distance.
As he squats down, facing away from me and shuffling his position slightly, I raise my 9mm Beretta. I begin to feel as though I’m being submerged in honey. Time becomes sticky, slow and tangible.
The muzzle of my weapon gradually rises past my chest level. I can see the front sight come up higher, seeking a straight shot at this monster’s back.
In a heartbeat, it all starts to go wrong.
He has seen me over his shoulder. I am now a threat, a threat to his life and very close. I have been caught creeping and the world, except for the two of us, will now cease to exist until this tableau has played out. Only one of us will walk away; only one will survive. A few seconds ago, I’d have bet it would be me going home that night, but now I’m not so sure.
My breathing slows despite a massive surge of adrenaline flowing through my veins. I try to move faster but can’t, like those dreams when you try to run from some threat and your body just can’t respond. I am too slow, and he’s going to get the drop on me.
I can see it all, the muzzle of the AK-47, the 100-round drum, the ground littered with spent casings and the dark eyes fixated on me, full of loathing. He looks like an angry cobra puffed up and ready to strike.
My breathing slows even more; I feel like I’m not getting enough oxygen. Tunnel vision closes in.
Why can’t I breathe?!
With my gun now pointed squarely at the center of his chest, I jerk back on the trigger; the metal pressing against my right forefinger.
This is it! I got you after all! Or so I think.
Nothing! The trigger will not move.
I squeeze harder. Again, nothing. It feels jammed solid.
WHAT IS HAPPENING?
The muzzle of his rifle is now squarely on me. Another second, maybe a half, and it will be all over.
I glance at my weapon in confused amazement. I feel like I haven’t drawn a breath in minutes. My head is spinning, my chest constricted, and I can hear the blood roaring through my ears.
I give it one last chance and pull back on the trigger with all that I have.
Nothing. Not even a millimeter.
Realizing that it is probably over, I look up from where the rounds of my 9mm should have gone and then at his face. Looking at his eyes, I can see under his sweat-sodden ski mask that the corners of his eyes are crinkled. He is smiling at me! With his leather-gloved finger curled around the AK-47’s trigger, it seems as though his jaw is mouthing something from behind the ski mask.
Panic courses through me and everything goes black as the world seems instantly yanked from me.
Am I shot? Is this it? What happened?
Drawing one long rasp of fresh air, I feel like I have just popped to the surface after too deep of a dive in some murky waters. It is dark, I am covered in sweat, and my heart is pounding like a jackhammer.
Where am I?
My vision clears. The panic steps down half-a-notch as I see moonlight through our bedroom window, a soft night breeze stirring the half-open curtains.
My wife’s hand touches my shoulder as she asks, “You okay?”
I can hear in her voice that she is wide awake and knows I had the nightmare again.
“Yeah, just another dream,” I reply. “I’m fine.”
We both know that is not true. There is an increasing menace, one we would not understand much about or know how to handle until it had already run its course.
I climb out of bed. I feel like a long distance runner at the end of a race, physically and mentally spent. The nightmare was like an adrenaline rush with an abrupt “hit the ground with no parachute” end.
Quietly, I make my way downstairs without turning on the lights and get a long drink of cold water. Standing in the darkness, I know there is no more sleep in store for me tonight.
I move to the living room, slump into my favorite end of the sofa and, with haunting memories to ponder, realize it is from here that I will watch the dawn break once again.
My name is John Caprarelli. I was a police officer with the Los Angeles Police Department. This is my story.
*****
1. OUT OF THE ORDINARY
There’s a term I favor, a sequence of words that rolls nicely off the tongue, a phrase that I believe adequately sums up what a cop’s career, especially in Los Angeles, is all about: riding the bullet.
Like a bullet fired from a gun, a cop’s career can fly straight, true and unimpeded, to gently fall far from view, its energy and time spent and undamaged.
Those cops are the lucky ones, the vast majority who go through the gauntlet receiving maybe a scrape or two, never firing their weapons in defense of life or suffering any major injuries or traumas. They remain relatively unaffected by the situations they face as “a badge.” Yeah, they are the lucky ones.
The flip side to that particular coin is that a cop’s career can be totally different, his or her own particular bullet being a ricochet slamming wildly into one intense event, bouncing hard and tumbling unpredictably to the next.
There is no way to tell which particular bullet one will “ride” when signing up for the job. It’s all how you roll the dice and how you’re wired. Some can handle a wild ride; some cannot and sometimes see a rather short career.
Me? Well I came through, I survived. Twenty-seven years saw me ride a pretty wild bullet of my own. Admittedly I was bounced and bucked pretty hard, but I clung on and I’m here now to give you a glimpse inside what it was like to be a first responder, a cop in one of America’s largest and most diverse cities.
Being a cop is not for everybody. It takes a person with a certain mentality, the same way it is for a person who joins the military, fire department or ranks of emergency medical professionals. The police department wasn’t something I grew up longing to join but, unknown to me, that certain mentality was in my blood, taking me on a rather circuitous route to end where I did.
Before getting into that though, I want to take you back to the early days of my life.
When I was a child, my name would have been found in the “Average Everyday American Kid” column.
My father was of Italian descent. Raised in Providence, Rhode Island, and moving west to Los Angeles in the mid-1950’s, he worked in the banking industry. My mother came from an Irish and English background in Fort Fairfield, Maine, and moved to Los Angeles around the same time to continue a nursing career. One day she walked into the bank where my father worked as a teller, and the rest is history.
I was born in 1957, and after a couple years of apartment jumping, my parents bought a house in the San Fernando Valley. It was a relatively crime-free area at the time, and my life, as any child’s should be, was idyllic. Through my childhood, I was sufficient in physical abilities and academics, but not blessed enough to have either in remarkable portions.
It turns out that God was saving some generous blessings for me later in life.
For the time being, I enjoyed childhood, playing with friends on the block, and when they weren’t around I could be found with my plastic green soldiers and tanks re-enacting battles from old war movies for hours on end. John Wayne, a stand-up guy and always on the winning side, was usually my favorite hero leading the charge. It was the good guys and the bad guys fighting it out, which I think planted a seed in my mind.
The time came when, like many boys in their younger years, I wanted to be a fireman. The large, shiny red trucks that commanded right of way with their flashing lights and blaring sirens never failed to captivate my attention. I wondered what it must be like to be riding on one of those. pver time, it wasn’t just the trucks that caught my attention. I also thought of the camaraderie that must exist in such a profession—a bunch of guys all working together for the same cause helping people, saving people. I was sold. That’s what I wanted to do. It was a dream that I would hold onto for quite a long time.
With education being very important to my parents, my early years were spent in private schools in the San Fernando Valley. While I was in junior high school, we moved to a newer development in nearby Tujunga, a picturesque community nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Hastily enrolling me in the local public school for ninth grade, my parents quickly realized that I needed a more challenging environment for learning. They presented me with two choices for high school: Flintridge Preparatory School, a prestigious all-boys school in La Cañada, and Village Christian School, a smaller co-ed school in Sun Valley whose Curriculum revolved around the teachings of the Bible. I was interested in two things at that time: sports and girls. Flintridge had the better sports program, but Village Christian was still the easy choice.
Playing sports in high school, I found out that, despite bouts with asthma, I was a pretty good athlete. The adrenaline rush of competing and winning was addicting. I excelled in basketball and football and even got the attention of a few scouts, but I was just a bit too short and too thin to earn a sports scholarship. My sports career ended at graduation.
My teenage years overlapped the end of the so-called hippie era. The Vietnam War was raging in Asia while the “free love” movement raged against it back at home. I was intrigued with the whole hippie thing. The music was a big draw. Black lights with fluorescent posters were something new, and the whole idea of peace and harmony seemed like a good one.
I grew my hair as long as my parents would allow—which wasn’t much. I didn’t fight them though, because I knew that in the end the school dress code couldn’t be trumped anyway.
My parents were very supportive of me, taking an active interest in my extracurricular activities. When I showed a passion and aptitude for photography, my father even built a darkroom in our garage and taught me to develop and print my own photographs.
Was I going to be the next Alfred Eisenstaedt? Or maybe a war photographer traipsing through a foreign land with a camera slung around my neck and a joint dangling from the corner of my mouth? No way. As much as the hippie movement captivated me, the drugs side of it never held an interest. I never understood how anyone could put such dangerous substances into their body. I had my mother the nurse to thank for that. I can still remember her saying “It just takes once,” referring to the possibility of losing your life by toying with a drug even once. It really stuck with me.
I didn’t go through a rebellious time like many of my friends. In fact, I had come to believe and accept the Christian teachings I was learning at Village Christian. However, out of wrong expectations and ignorance, I didn’t let those teachings fully take hold. I put the whole faith thing on the back burner, but a recurring reminder, a subconscious “tapping on the shoulder,” would follow me for many years.
The best thing about high school was meeting my future wife, Lynn, in the tenth grade. One day between classes, trying to act cool with my buddies, I saw her standing nearby talking to some friends. Her carefree shag hairstyle and crystal blue eyes snagged me like a fish hook. I caught her taking an extra glance in my direction, and, with a little persistence, we were eventually “going steady.” Years later, I learned that her extra glance was not one of romantic interest but to see who was doing such a fine job of embarrassing himself. It didn’t matter. The end justified the means.
Despite Lynn’s transfer to another school in our junior year, we remained a couple, and about a year after graduating high school, on November 6, 1976, we married. I was nineteen, and she was eighteen. A lot of people said it wouldn’t last, whispers we heard standing in the reception line at our wedding. I didn’t care though. I was so happy, and you couldn’t have dragged the smile off my face with a team of wild horses. We were joyfully looking toward our future together, not only as husband and wife but also as best friends.
With me employed as an assistant night manager at a Bob’s Big Boy Restaurant and Lynn as a bank teller at Home Savings, we took up residence in a one-bedroom apartment in the San Fernando Valley.
It was only a couple of miles from the fire station where Lynn’s uncle, Chris Irons, served as a captain with the Los Angeles City Fire Department. Crossing paths with him around town and at family functions reminded me of my childhood dreams and rekindled my thoughts of becoming a firefighter. But with Lynn working days at the bank and me putting in excessive hours at the restaurant at night, those thoughts would be buried for another five years. We scraped by financially. I later worked as a pharmaceuticals delivery driver and then a motion picture film lab technician. They were decent jobs, but that was about it.
When my first son was born in 1980, I began to realize that I needed a more solid, stable and profitable foundation on which my family and I could ground ourselves. That was the impetus for me to finally act on my thoughts about joining the fire department. I hooked up with Lynn’s Uncle Chris, who took me under his wing and began preparing me for the testing process, both mentally and physically.
At the time, retirements from the fire department were at low ebb. This, coupled with the department’s other hiring policies then, made things slow going. Time continued to fly by, and with talk of us having another child, I eventually added a night-time security guard job at the ABC Entertainment Center in Century City. Eight hours at the film lab during the day followed by eight hours as a guard walking a beat were exhausting, but we needed the money.
Forgetting for a moment some traffic citations I got in my early “hot rod” days, my first involvement with LAPD officers doing their job was during one long, cold night in Century City.
A silent burglar alarm, known in LAPD jargon as a “Code 30,” had been activated in one of the buildings and the police automatically dispatched. Nervously pumped up at the thought of burglars nearby, I was a little perplexed at how nonchalant the officers were when they showed up, actually cracking a few jokes as they walked up to the offices. They took a quick look around to see if there were any kicked-in doors or smashed windows and then left me standing there, with raised eyebrows, as they joked their way back to their cruiser and drove away.
I remember thinking, “Well, that was quick!” No bullhorns, battering rams or SWAT team to storm in and apprehend the burglars who I was sure were inside cleaning the place out? No helicopters or searchlights? Nope, just a couple of wisecracking old-timers who had handled this same type of call a hundred times before.
I didn’t know at the time that over ninety percent of “Code 30’s” were false alarms, or that years later I would end up handling hundreds of them myself in the same way those two officers did, jokes and all.
It was just a few months later at a wedding reception that I met a gentleman new to my wife’s side of the family who was a sergeant with the LAPD. When my ongoing and increasingly frustrating attempts at becoming a firefighter became the topic of conversation, he noted that there were numerous police department vacancies coming up and asked if I had ever thought of becoming a police officer instead. I hadn’t, and not much more was discussed at that point, but the bug had been put in my ear.
I later recalled the two officers who had responded to the Code 30 in Century City, and my curiosity began to take off. As days went by, I started remembering all the Adam-12 and Dragnet TV shows I watched in the past, as well as movies like The New Centurions.
Could I do that type of work?
That police sergeant apparently thought I could and so I started over, trading the pursuit of riding those shiny red trucks for patrolling within the confines of a black-and-white.
*****
2. SELECTION
My shoes were nervously tapping quiet acapellas on the tile floor. They seemed to be on autopilot and wouldn’t stop even if I wanted them to. Five months had gone by, and it was now D-Day.
Nothing could calm me down.
It was June, 1982, and I was inside a bland, square room deep in the white brick-and-glass-clad LAPD Parker Center in downtown Los Angeles. The white-noise hum of the air conditioner, soft murmur of conversations and impatient shuffling of chairs shared the air with the musty smell of an old classroom harboring aged dry books and chalk dust. Sitting among sixty others anxious for their own breaks to unfold, my mind raced, “C’mon already! Let’s get this show on the road!”